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Wordpress tells us that this is our 200th post on the r.i.c.e blog. We thank you, our readers, for being with us all this while. We wrote two new articles this past week. Actually, we wrote more, but only two...Read More..

Jairam Ramesh, who in his short tenure as India's minister for Sanitation (and in his longer tenure as Rural Development Minister) did a lot to advance the cause of ending open defecation in India, has a new article about ending...Read More..

There is much that is tragic about this story: Rape Allegations in a Haryana Village Underscore a Social Fracas. The crime itself appears to have been profound; the subsequent blaming of the victims, familiar; the terrible consequences of the social...Read More..

Live Mint invokes a martial metaphor: Launching a war against malnutrition. What would such a war look like? Who would be the enemies? How would they be defeated? It is not an easy question. Wars are usually things that states...Read More..

Today, the switching study team finished its final qualitative interview! We have learned a lot about sanitation attitudes and behaviors -- from the banks of the Arabian Sea in Gujarat, to the foothills of the Himalayas in the Nepali terai....Read More..

In a new article in the business newspaper LiveMint, Sumit Mishra discusses the increasing recognition of the importance of sanitation in India. Mishra writes: The importance of sanitation can be gauged by looking at the manifestos of the two major...Read More..

Indian voters are often asked to vote for, among other things, lotuses, cycles, lanterns, elephants, watches, or hammers and sickles. Six decades ago, when a largely illiterate and unschooled country decided to embark on an experiment in political democracy, images...Read More..

Different places in India are voting in national elections on different days. Diane and I wrote these thoughts about the election together. Today, India is preparing for an election which will shape the lives of more people than any election...Read More..

I wanted to share Jeff Hammer's blog post on the World Bank blog about the role of development economists in policy making. More wise words from Jeff Hammer can be found on a previous blog post on the Indian health...Read More..

In fact, Sagar, Madhya Pradesh – where I have been watching the surveyors ask about toilets – is not any more horrible than the other districts where we have done the survey, but I could not resist the pun. Yesterday,...Read More..

A recent article about child height in the Lancet has been getting wide attention, even at macroeconomist Paul Krugman’s blog. As Sebastian Vollmer and coauthors conclude, in their paper titled “Association between economic growth and early childhood undernutrition: evidence from...Read More..

I have spent most of the past three days in airports or airplanes going to or coming from Australia. Even in a 26 hour visit, there was enough time for me to be deeply impressed. In particular, this is the...Read More..

Editor's Note: Nicholas Lawson is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Aix-Marseille School of Economics, and is the newest member of the r.i.c.e. extended family. Nicholas is a labour economist who has been studying the effect of early life health and...Read More..

Sitting at the Delhi airport at 5:30 am, I noticed a pair of signs. The first was the official, plastic government-sponsored sign for the family restroom: "Baby Care," illustrated with a diaper. The second, printed on what we used to...Read More..